Research metrics

The most common form of bibliometrics is a simple citation count - paper X has been cited by 73 other papers. This gives a general idea of how influential a paper has been in the academic literature.

Citation counts can be deceptively tricky to interpret, particularly if you are comparing two different papers. You may need to consider, for example:

• What field is something in? Twenty citations may be high in one field, and low in another.
• How old is the paper? Older papers have had more time to recieve citations.
• Are the citations all positive? In some cases, citations might indicate a controversial or even "famously wrong" paper

It is often a good idea to look at using normalised metrics, which take account of factors such as age and subject area in order to give a contextual value and compare like-for-like.